..”half of Franco’s cabinet, back in the dark ages of WWII, were members of Opus Dei”.

Opus Dei chooses to recruit for membership are the cream of American, European and Latin American society. They include owners of big multinational companies, members of the U.S. Congress, the press and finance magnates, as well as heads of state, governmental, religious and even secular educational bodies. U.S. Supreme Court judges Alito, Scalia and Thomas…

Exposing these connections helps to undermine the fraudulent basis for the
war making and the irreligious and immoral pontificating from the likes of right wing, neo-fascist fanatics like the current pope, who solemnly offers little of true Christian solace, instead spewing only more bombs and phoney benedictions.

Here is how the Opus Dei and the Vatican perpetuate poor countries and poor peoples. We highlight bold emphasis in article pertinent to our points about evil Opus Dei.

==========

OPUS DEI: THE VATICAN-PENTAGON CONNECTION

by Frank Morales, The Shadow

Pope Takes Manhattan

[April, 2008] While visiting New York City, Pope Benedict was sure to visit the offices of his „personal prelature,” the Opus Dei organization. Most certainly, he’ll marvel at their spanking new 17-story national headquarters, an imposing red brick building at 243 Lexington Avenue, which the highly secretive Catholic lay organization purchased for a cool $69 million in 2000, during all the hoopla over the Da Vinci Code.

Their headquarters opened for business during the fateful year of 2001, at the dawn of the new crusades against the oil-rich Islamic infidels of Eurasia. Opus Dei and its elite backers, most prominently Pope Benedict XVI, have since continued to manifest a Holy Coincidence of agendas with Bush Administration foreign policy, particularly the kind that does not always make the headlines.

Opus Dei, Decoded

Opus Dei is arguably the most powerful and virulent of the fundamentalist religious fervor sweeping the globe, only this time it’s Catholic fundamentalists we’re talking about–hard-liners who trace their origins back to the Holy Inquisition and the bloody Crusades. Not surprisingly, they have a somewhat different opinion of themselves. According to their website [] „Opus Dei is a Catholic institution and adheres to Catholic doctrine, which clearly condemns immoral behavior, including murder, lying, stealing, and generally injuring people.”

It was during the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco in 1928 Spain that Catholic priest José María Escriva de Balaguer founded the Opus Dei organization. As Franco’s spiritual advisor, Balaguer chose and trained the elite members of the dictatorship, placing him and his Opus Dei at the center of authoritarian power. Later, Balaguer was sent to the Vatican, and from there he worked to spread the influence of Opus Dei, especially to Latin America, where it sought to carry out an ongoing campaign to tame Catholic liberation theology priests, condemned for appreciating Marxist analyses and for opposing military or Catholic dictatorships and the ideal of a fascist theocratic regime.

Balaguer, who was fast-tracked into sainthood in 2002, concocted a series of axioms for a radically right-wing, anti-woman lay movement which has over the years aligned itself with some of the most brutal dictatorships in modern times, including that of Chile’s Augusto Pinochet during the 1970s, and most recently, the 2002 aborted coup attempt against Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. While exceedingly sophisticated in its political and business practice, Opus Dei is profoundly anti-modern in its ideology. Spiritual cousin to the „practical Christianity” of the Hitler youth, half of Franco’s cabinet, back in the dark ages of WWII, were members of Opus Dei.

Though he was never a member of the National Socialist (Nazi) party in Germany, as a seminarian, Joseph Alois Ratzinger, the current Pope Benedict XVI, was briefly enrolled in the Hitler Youth in the early 1940s. In 1943, he was conscripted into an anti-aircraft unit guarding a BMW plant outside Munich. Later, he was sent to Austria’s border with Hungary to erect tank traps. After being shipped back to Bavaria, he apparently deserted. When the war ended, Ratzinger was an American prisoner of war. Perhaps he was one of scores of other Nazis who were sheltered, protected and eventually employed by our own government’s newly-created intelligence agencies and their emerging cold war obsession with the Soviet threat.

In 1982, the Opus Dei organization became a personal prelature of the Vatican–that is, a separate church entity beholden only to the Pope. From that moment on, Opus Dei members escaped the authority of the bishops in the territories in which they reside. Consequently, they function as a sort of instrument of Vatican social control, like its very own global SS, something that brings to mind another historic sect which ruled with religious terror in the Spain of the 16th Century before imposing and exporting its fanaticism to the universal Church: the Inquisition.

Although Opus Dei is a part of the church’s structure, it is not like traditional dioceses, which are defined geographically, but instead is defined by its „worldwide purpose,” which is to dominate the church and selected governments while promoting extremist, right-wing policies aligned to a corporate, imperialist, and big business agendas. With roughly 88,000 members worldwide, including about 2,000 priests, the organization spans some 61 countries, including roughly 3,000 members in the United States.

Estimated to hold assets of about $3 billion, the free-floating personal prelature, which purports to do „the work of God” (translation of „Opus Dei,”), Opus Dei is beholden to no one but the Pope, whose spokesperson, Cardinal Joaquin Navarro-Valls, is also an Opus Dei member. Appointing its own priests and bishops to rule over the lay membership, it runs 15 universities, 7 hospitals, 11 business schools and a great number of primary, secondary and technical schools, functioning as an underground force for political reaction within the Catholic church, keen on the tactics of infiltration and „holy deception.”

The organization’s membership includes elite elements who wield influence at the highest levels of government, the Vatican, and the Vatican Bank. The individuals that Opus Dei chooses to recruit for membership are the cream of American, European and Latin American society. They include owners of big multinational companies, members of the U.S. Congress, the press and finance magnates, as well as heads of state, governmental, religious and even secular educational bodies. U.S. Supreme Court judges Alito, Scalia and Thomas have been linked to Opus Dei, as have Congressmen Brownback and former Congressman Rick Santorum.

One current Opus Dei member worth noting is Joseph E Schmitz. A former Pentagon Inspector General, he became Chief of Operations for Blackwater Worldwide, the private security firm, in 2005. While at the Pentagon, he’d been tasked with the job of overseeing all war contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. His connection to war profiteers became well known. At least $2 trillion went „missing” from the Pentagon during his watch. Shortly after Schmitz exonerated his friends in the war industry, he announced that he was going to work for Blackwater, where he is today.

In a 2004 speech, Schmitz said: „No American today should ever doubt that we hold ourselves accountable to the rule of law under God. Here lies the fundamental difference between us and the terrorists.” Aside from his membership in Opus Dei, Schmitz is also a member of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, a Christian militia formed in the 11th century, before the first Crusades, with the mission of defending territories that the Crusaders had conquered from the Moslems. Blackwater leadership, like Joseph Schmitz, think they are following in that tradition.

To target our own nation’s brightest students, Opus Dei runs off-campus housing and centers around Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island; Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey and numerous other elite universities and business schools. Situated in the front of these institutions, along with military recruiters, they troll for the young and impressionable, the up-and-coming with the right set of ideas, teaching them to worship money and repress sexuality, saturating them with all the tricks of psycho-moonie cults–an oppressive group therapy designed to produce obedient soldiers in the war for the soul of America.

Vatican Meets Pentagon Inc.

Evidence of the hand of Opus Dei within the machinations of U.S. imperialism becomes manifest when one examines the manner by which the Catholic organization secures its financing. According to Charity Navigator, a philanthropic evaluation service, „The Woodlawn Foundation supports activities conducted by the Roman Catholic Prelature Opus Dei…(whose) Services extend to the broad general public.” Located in New Rochelle, the Woodlawn Foundation is the primary conduit of financing for the Opus Dei organization. According to Guidestar, Woodlawn provides „grants to over 40 Opus Dei-affiliated foundations,” while maintaining assets of about $15 million. John B. Haley, an Opus Dei member, is the President and Director of the foundation.

Now, according to Hoover On-Line, a business database and information resource, the Woodlawn Foundation, as of June 2001, controlled some 10,000 shares, with estimated proceeds of $415,000, of Advanced Energy Systems Corporation (AES), the largest producer of energy in the world, with nearly $12 billion in revenue.

Again, according to Hoover: „The right place at the right time–is it kismet? No, it’s AES….The company has interests in 120 generation facilities in the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean that give it a combined net generating capacity of more than 44 gigawatts of power (primarily fossil-fueled); it also has power plants under construction. AES sells electricity to utilities and other energy marketers through wholesale contracts or on the spot market. AES also sells power directly to customers worldwide through its interests in distribution utilities, mainly in Latin America.”

Known by some for their sleazy business practices, a November 17, 2002 Associated Press piece entitled, „Evidence of Price Gouging During California Energy Crisis,” reported that during the 2002 California energy scandal, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which was looking into corruption in the California energy industry, focused on „discussions between employees of Williams and AES Corporation about prolonging an outage at a power plant to take advantage of higher prices the state was paying at the height of the crisis.”

Corporate Watch, on August 28, 2003, pointed out that „Virginia-based AES, the world’s largest independent energy producer, is currently under investigation by the Ugandan Inspectorate of Government and the US Justice Department for alleged bribery, in violation of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.”

The former master chairman of AES, recently deceased, was Richard G. Darman, former director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget; former Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Treasury; former Assistant U.S. Secretary of Commerce; and member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. A director of AES from July 2002; Darman was elected Chairman of the Board on May 1, 2003. In addition to his service as Chairman of AES, Darman was a Partner and Managing Director of the Carlyle Group, joining Carlyle in February 1993, after serving in the cabinet of the first Bush administration.

The Carlyle Group, the high-flying financier of the Pentagon Incorporated, is perhaps the most well-connected enterprise on earth linking business to the voracious appetite of U.S. militarism. The 11th largest defense contractor on the planet, they are, according to the Washington Post, „the largest private equity manager in the world,” which „buys and sells whole companies the way some firms trade shares of stock.” In fact, they treat whole countries that way. Other Carlyle Group members include James Baker, former English Prime Minister John Major, and former president and CIA chief George Bush Sr. In short, Carlyle represents the very essence of the „military-industrial complex,” a complex blessed, apparently, by the likes of Opus Dei.

Holy Counterinsurgency

Over the years, Pope Benedict XVI has applied Balaguer’s vision and the Opus Dei brand of fascist social policy with zeal. According to Thierry Meyssan’s article, „Opus Dei Sets Out to Conquer the World”, as president of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly the Office of the Holy Inquisition, the former Joseph Ratzinger oversaw, during the Reagan era, the setting up of a „surveillance center in Bogotá, Colombia, with a powerful computer of strategic capacity that was connected to the Vatican.” Its purpose: to record all data and political activities of designated leftist Latin American priests and religious people dedicated to the vision and practice of liberation theology, a movement that sees justice for the poor as synonymous with God’s will.

As a consequence of the intelligence data that was gathered, and its dissemination to U.S.-trained „counterinsurgency” experts, Colombian government-sponsored death squads were able to identify and assassinate many people. This was the case in El Salvador, with the murder of scores of religious workers, including the outspoken „voice of the poor,” Archbishop Oscar Romero.

According to an article by Marianne Johnson entitled, „The Hand of Opus Dei in El Salvador,” „under Archbishop Sáenz Lacalle, an Opus Dei man,” who in 1997 accepted the title of Brigadier General from the U.S.-supported Salvadoran military, „the strategy has not been to reform liberation theology, but to undo and remove all traces of it.” The ground for this „strategy” had been prepared by Cardinal Ratzinger, who in 1996 had gone so far as to make the nakedly fraudulent claim, during a press conference in Mexico City, that liberation theology is an „ideological stream which is the source of many violent actions on the Continent.”

The Coup in Venezuela

Interestingly, Ratzinger’s visit to New York in April just about coincided with the sixth anniversary of the abortive U.S.-backed Venezuelan coup attempt, which was in no small measure aided and abetted by the Pope’s Opus Dei organization.

According to the Los Angeles Times of April 22, 2002, following the short-lived April 11 Venezuelan coup, would-be president „Carmona had named a government that included several members of the ultraconservative Roman Catholic group Opus Dei.” The April 22 Guardian reported that after „the military appeared in full uniform on national television to announce that [President Hugo] Chavez had resigned, Carmona was installed and almost immediately issued a decree dissolving the national assembly and the supreme court, and announced a far-right government including, as foreign minister, Jose Rodriguez Iturbe, a member of the right-wing Catholic organization Opus Dei.”

Although the coup was relatively bloodless, the April 21 London Observer reported that „more than 100 people died in events before and after the coup.” It is likely that the death toll was worse than that. According to eye-witness reports, the newly-installed Opus Dei cabinet under Carmona went about some frenzied house-cleaning. Luis Duno Gottberg, reporting from Venezuela, told Left Turn magazine that, immediately following the coup, „the president [Chavez] was made prisoner and taken from the capital,” whereupon „a cabinet composed of high bourgeois elements and members of Opus Dei, a conspiratorial right wing Catholic organization, suspended the National Assembly and began the removal of various democratically-elected state governors.”

According to Gottberg, „brutal repression was not long in coming. There were house-to-house searches, lynchings and executions of community leaders and Chavez partisans that took place with the utmost impunity. The television stations and the national press supported the new de-facto government and silenced dissident voices.”

As is known, what came to pass was that two days later, by April 13, Chavez was back in the driver’s seat, heading a victorious counter-coup, sparked by a massive uprising of the people of Venezuela.

A week later, further information surfaced, revealing that elements of the Bush regime, working with Opus Dei, were involved in the attempted removal of Chavez. The April 21 Observer pointed this out in a bold headline, „Venezuela Coup Linked to Bush Team,” making reference to certain American „specialists in the ‚dirty wars’ of the eighties,” who „encouraged the plotters who tried to topple President Chavez.” These officials were named: Otto Reich, John Negroponte (former U.S. intelligence czar, currently envoy to Iraq), and Elliot Abrams. All are veterans of the Reagan administration’s illegal and bloody wars throughout Central America; and all were subsequently indicted for various crimes.

In conclusion, the cozy relationship between the Woodlawn Foundation, financiers of Opus Dei, and the AES Corp/Carlyle Group, signal a tangible connection between the machinations of the Vatican and the Pentagon Incorporated, as well as the documented hand of Opus Dei in the aborted U.S.- backed coup attempt in Venezuela. This marriage, surely made in hell, is not surprising though, when we consider the ideological requirements of a so-called ‚war on terror’ which trumpets an Islamic ‚axis of evil,’ a throwback to the days of the bloody Crusades.

Exposing these connections helps to undermine the fraudulent basis for the
war making and the irreligious and immoral pontificating from the likes of right wing, neo-fascist fanatics like the current pope, who solemnly offers little of true Christian solace, instead spewing only more bombs and phoney benedictions.

The Bushes and the Pope

Finally, according to the Israeli journalist Zvi Ba’rel, writing in Haaretz (July 7, 2004), the „British American Security Information Council (BASIC), a Washington, DC think tank, revealed that a Carlyle consultant, Richard Burt, former US Ambassador to Germany, also heads another company, Diligence, a firm that provides private security services in Iraq.” Set up in 2003, „Diligence was founded by William Webster, a former director of the CIA and the FBI. Former senior CIA officials are now at its helm, among them Whitley Bruner, formerly head of the agency’s Baghdad station, now director of the Iraq branch of Diligence. The deputy chairman of Diligence, Joe Allbaugh, was the current President Bush’s campaign manager in 2000. Diligence is a member of the Private Security Company Association of Iraq.

According to Ba’rel, in 2004, „Diligence signed a contract with New Bridge Strategies, a firm headed by Allbaugh, to supply business information about postwar Iraq.” New Bridge Strategies provides „security services and intelligence information to private companies seeking to do business in Iraq. According to one US diplomat recently back from Iraq, these companies are a kind of private army. They have their own security personnel and their own intelligence corps. They even make agreements with heads of local tribes to supply defense and information, a major source of their income, according to the diplomat.”

New Bridge has a presence in Baghdad, Beirut, Geneva, Houston, Kuwait, and Washington, DC. According to their former website, http://www.newbridgestrategies.com, „the opportunities evolving in Iraq today are of such an unprecedented nature and scope that no other existing firm has the necessary skills and experience to be effective both in Washington, DC, and on the ground in Iraq.” And the opportunities involve more than contracting for „private security,” which we already know is big business. According to Douglas Jehl, writing in the New York Times (Sept. 30, 2003), in an article entitled, „Washington Insiders’ New Firm Consults on Contracts in Iraq,” „a group of businessmen linked by their close ties to President Bush, his family and his administration have set up a consulting firm to advise companies that want to do business in Iraq, including those seeking pieces of taxpayer-financed reconstruction projects.” With praise from the likes of former Iraqi golden boy Ahmed Chalabi—who stated that, „New Bridge Strategies has done a stellar job of recommending to me the best contractors for the jobs to be done”—they can’t go wrong, especially when they have the Bushes around. And they do.

According to the Financial Times of Dec. 11, 2003, in a piece entitled, „Middle East: Bush’s Brother Helped New Bridge Strategies Businessmen,” „two businessmen instrumental in setting up New Bridge Strategies, a well-connected Washington firm designed to help clients win contracts in Iraq, have previously used an association with the younger brother of President George W. Bush to seek business in the Middle East… John Howland, the company president, and Jamal Daniel, a principal, have maintained an important business relationship with Neil Bush stretching back several years.”

Ah yes, the young Neilster, an embarrassment to not one, but two presidents. According to the Washington Post (Dec. 28, 2003), in a piece entitled „The Relatively Charmed Life Of Neil Bush,” „in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Bush embarrassed his father, George HW Bush, with his shady dealings as a board member of the infamous Silverado Savings and Loan, whose collapse cost taxpayers $1 billion… Now, Bush has embarrassed his brother George W. Bush with a made-for-the-tabloids divorce that featured paternity rumors, a defamation suit and, believe it or not, allegations of voodoo.” Apparently, „during Bush’s very nasty divorce battle” when asked by his wife’s attorney whether he’d had any extramarital affairs, Bush told the story of his Asian hotel room escapades. „Mr. Bush,” said the attorney, Marshall Davis Brown, „you have to admit that it’s a pretty remarkable thing for a man just to go to a hotel room door and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex with her.” „It was very unusual,” Bush replied. Actually, it wasn’t that unusual. It happened at least three or four times during Bush’s business trips to Asia. „I don’t remember the exact number,” Neil admitted.

Neil‚s womanizing, divorcing and dabbling in voodoo, though, wasn’t sufficient to alienate one very important business co-partner—namely the future Pope Benedict XVI, Josef Ratzinger. According to New York Newsday (April 21, 2005), „Neil Bush, the president’s controversial younger brother, six years ago joined the cardinal who this week became Pope Benedict XVI as a founding board member of a little known Swiss ecumenical foundation. The charter members of the board were all well-known international religious figures, except for Bush and his close friend and business partner, Jamal Daniel, whose family has extensive holdings in the United States and Switzerland, public records show. The Foundation for Interreligious and Intercultural Research and Dialogue was founded in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1999 to promote ecumenical understanding and publish original religious texts, said a foundation official.”

In conclusion, the cozy relationship between the Woodlawn Foundation, financiers of Opus Dei, and the AES Corp/Carlyle Group signal a tangible connection between the machinations of the Vatican and the Pentagon, and US intelligence intrigues such as the coup attempt in Venezuela. This marriage, surely made in hell, is not surprising when we consider the ideological requirements of a so-called „war on terror” which trumpets an Islamic „axis of evil”—a throwback to the days of the bloody Crusades. Exposing these connections helps to undermine the deeply reactionary basis for the war-making.

A different version of this story appeared in the summer 2008 edition of the lower Manhattan sporadical The Shadow.

Opus Dei controlled the 27 years papacy of John Paul II and is therefore the foremost guilty party who aided and abetted and covered-up the John Paul II Pedophiles Rapists-Priests Army. Opus Dei wrote most of John Paul II’s books and writings and to ensure their perpetuity as “All things Catholic”, they want JP2 to be beatified and canonized now by Benedict XVI so as not to take any chances on other future popes. The FACE of Opus Dei is John Paul II and the PHANTOM Spirit of Opus Dei is their founder St. Josemaria Escriva, read our related article John Paul II, Patron of Pederasts and Opus Dei – analysis of Joaquin Navarro-Valls’ reasons for JP2 beatification at Opus Dei conference in Rome http://jp2m.blogspot.com/2011/04/why-john-paul-ii-is-opus-deis-patron.html

===========

An interesting read with some very interesting tidbits of information ……Last night I was watching the history of Peter Paul and Mary the folk group.They traveled to El Salvador and met with the people who were being hunted and murdered by the dictatorship government at the time. They said they were truly ashamed of our country and it’s policies at that time.

BTW…….Sodano / Chile and Pio Laghi/ Argentina and also close friends with the Bush family. Laghi and Bush daddy were often tennis partners. Marcial could only wish he had this much power!

Catholics in America and elswhere need to really study the case of ArchBishop Romero and his murder and they better understand what Liberation Theology really meant to the oppressed and not just the Marxist label that was used to descibe it or they will be doomed to become victims themselves.

Funny isn’t it that Bush gave COMMUNIST China Most favored Trade status while we allegedly oppose marxism in South America? It seems the marxist Commuist card comes in to play only when opus dei /vatican and our own government wants to use it because it garnishes sentiment from people who just don’t know what the hell is going on.